With so many people in our generations growing up on Harry Potter, it can seem kind of nuts that magic-related things would be restricted to us when we were kids. But plenty of children grew up with restrictions to what they could watch or otherwise consume- typically the children of very religious parents. Here are their stories.
u/monsteraadansonii asked: Redditors with religious parents, what nonsensical rules did you have about what video games/books/movies/etc. were okay while growing up?
Santa = Satan?
No Power Rangers (obtaining powers from crystals was witchcraft).
No Santa Clause (Santa was Satan apparently, we were too afraid to question that one).
No Pokemon (psychic powers came from the devil).
XxVerdantFlamesxXReally big butterflies.
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Pokémon promoted evolution, and therefore was a corruption menace, leading to my secret cards being discovered and shiny Lapras being put through the washing machine :(
What's funny is that they didn't even start promoting evolution until regional forms came out. Before then, their "evolution" was really more like metamorphosis.
"No, mom, this isn't Darwinian. Just think of these things as really big butterflies instead."
Sorcery!
My wife is a librarian. She says a lot of parents restrict Harry Potter because it imperils their children's soul with tales of sorcery.
My dad is a very religious man. I mean to the point of reading the New Testament in Greek religious.
He read Harry Potter back when the whole 'ohmyGOD burn the heathen book' mess just started.
His response was 'do these people know the meaning of the word allegory?!' He thought the book was great and told quite a few nuts they were, well, nuts.
Those evil bicycle cards.
Almost anything could be construed as evil. We were playing with bicycle cards once and she looked at the king with the sword in his head and freaked out, threw away all the cards.
I was also told even thinking the word damn would get you sent to hell so I was always nervous when I thought about that. Basically just thinking "don't think damn, do not think damn".
Sports were pretty much the only thing I could watch besides Christian programming. I liked cartoons obviously but the only acceptable ones were these tapes we had that told bible stories.
Not the drums!
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My partner comes from a very religious household, and he was forbidden to listen to any music with drums in it because drums were the "devil's music".
Edit: just to answer some questions, his parents are really f*cking weird and seem to have their own version of Christianity. He and the rest of his siblings were homeschooled, and most of the time they do their own little church service from home. As far as I know they don't listen to any music at home still!
Jeez!
I wasn't allowed say "jeez" because it's "short for Jesus." That's the most annoying thing I can think of.
I almost got kicked out of a religious friend's house mid-slumber party for this. We were playing monopoly, I said "Jeez!" at some point, and her mom got up and left the room. I heard later from my friend that her mom was seriously considering calling my parents to come pick me up
That's kinda cute.
So this reminds me of a fantastic story. I went to Catholic high school so unsurprisingly a decent number of the teachers had fairly strong religious beliefs (all were super accepting and supportive of the students' beliefs and interests). My history teacher for 9th and 11th grade was one such teacher. His replacement for when he was irritated or in shock, etc. was "cheese and crackers!"
That just sounds racist to me, dog.
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Action and violence? No problem. Serial killer documentaries? No issue whatsoever. But anime was heresy and trading card games were the devil because "these things come from a different culture".
Tbh it wasn't as much of a problem that they were religious as it was that they were racist about anything non-western.
That's a little extra.
No Disney movies because they were full of magic. Harry Potter was of course pure evil.
Mother blew a fuse when she find my father had a Styx tape because that's the river in Hell.
I borrowed the Escaflowne anime box set from a friend in high school. My mother saw approximately 0.5 seconds of it and declared it evil. Her snide remarks next time said friend came around were enough to guilt her into selling it for a fraction of what it was worth.
No computer or video games on Sundays.
Parents wrote nasty letters to the local TV news because of their use of the phrase "blow job" during the Clinton impeachment.
The worst part is how long that sh*t sticks with you even after you finally escape it.
Edit: how could I forget the most ridiculous one — Halloween is devil worship, so when my elementary school classmates were colouring jack-o'-lanterns, I was sitting out in the hall with the Jehovah's Witness kid.
Nah, it's just vegetables.
I couldn't watch Dragon Ball Z because my mom heard on the radio that all their names had satanic meaning in Japanese. I told her "But I don't know Japanese! It means nothing to me." But she said the message could get buried in my brain and affect me subconsciously.
Turns out the names did have meaning, they're pretty much all types of food or food-related. Kakarot = Carrot, Vegeta = Vegetable, Raditz = Radish, Broly = Broccoli, Paragus = Asparagus, the list goes on.
If anything, DBZ would have subconsciously encouraged you to eat healthily.
Not The Simpsons!!!!
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For a short while I lived with my dad and his parents and the only thing they banned was the Simpsons. My dad and I still watched it when they weren't home though.
Good response.
My mother is a Cuban emigrant. She and my father were missionaries before I was even born. I wasn't allowed to watch/read/learn anything that wasn't directly related to the church. I "learned everything I need to know from the Bible." Instead of listing everything I wasn't allowed, I will just list the things that were confiscated by my mother for being non-religious.
- Garbage Pail Kids cards. Especially devastating because EVERYONE at my school had them, and I had traded a lot of stuff to get them. Also in this category, Baseball cards, and playing cards were not allowed, because the act of,"trading cards" is a form of gambling, somehow.
- Walkman, my parents didn't allow the private listening or viewing of anything. They said that they didn't allow it, because a) I could be listening to music, b) listening to Christian radio stations with headphones on was wrong, because it showed that I was embarrassed to listen to my Christian music in public, another sin.
- Books. Including text books. My parents believed that I was "called" to be a missionary, and therefore only needed to learn Christian material. I had a HUGE collection of used text books that I kept under my bed. When my parents went to work I learned everything I could, except Math. I hated Math, and had a hard time learning it on my own.
- I wasn't allowed to have friends, even Christian friends, because anyone can be tempted into being a bad influence.
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I haven't been in contact with my family since my father died. He was the last sane person in our family, and used to sneak me off to McDonald's for secret dinners. (Soda wasn't allowed at home.) He knew my life was hell, but he was a weak person. My mother sent me a long letter on my birthday that year, saying I was a hellbound sinner. So on her birthday, I sent her a photo of me in drag for Halloween, telling her that I just got a sex change. (I did not)
Cards for sorrow, cards for pain.
I lost several MTG decks to my religious grandmother. She would raise a huge stink about them being constructs of evil then burn them outside while praying.
Loved that woman but gawd she pissed me off sometimes.
Makes sense, I guess?
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I wasn't allowed to watch the Grimm Adventures of Billy and Mandy. I think my mom screamed at me once for that when I was nine, and I stopped watching that. To be fair, it is entirely about the grim reaper...
Try not to follow the bad advice given here, because you don't want to get the results that these guys did.
U/Duckerton375 asked: What's the worst advice someone ever gave you, but you still followed?
The workplace can bring a cornucopia of terrible advice. Don’t follow these unless you want to get fired.
​Bad jobs are usually not worth it.
Stick with a job no matter how bad it is. I stayed with a terrible job working retail, dealing with horrible customers and sexual harassment. I was told I wouldn't find anything better.
"No, no, you misunderstand. I said you wouldn't find anything better at making you feel like complete garbage."
This gets really creepy really fast.
frustrated workplace GIFGiphy"After you put in a job application, you need to call them at least once a day every day until they hire you."
Note: this did not get me hired. It got me called out by the HR person I was calling and forbidden to ever contact their facility again.
I work for a law firm that employees over 1500 people in the home office alone. Once I received a call from the building security saying, "Insert Name is here to speak with the owner." Well we are run by a committee so that's odd. Found out they just applied for a job and wanted to talk directly to the person that would potentially hire them. Told him the firm will contact them to schedule an interview. They refused to leave without "talking to the owner." Had security escort them out of the building.
​This is absolutely not true.
"Sleep is for people who do not want success" great words from my uncle, it almost killed me.
Now I may be oversleeping.
​Interpersonal relationships are also a big breeding ground for terrible advice. Don’t listen to any of these.
Heartbreaking.
My father always tought me and my brother that "having friends is bad and in the end they will never be there for you" so everytime I told my father about my friends he would get kinda mad and give me the advice to stop talking to them.
Now I am afraid of people and have several trust issues, thanks dad.
​This won’t end well.
A Christmas Story GIF by filmeditorGiphyIn the fifth grade my teacher was talking about bullying, then she said "if anyone tries to bully you just agree with them." So the next time I got bullied I agreed with the bully and they bullied me more.
Dude one time I saw an anti bullying video that told the victims to just BE NICE TO THE BULLY. Like the bully was hurling insults and the victim was smiling and complimenting him. My first thought was about how much I hated the mere thought that this would work. My second thought was of how the people who came up with that method had clearly never been bullied.
​Oof.
When I met my now wife at the age of 19, one of my coworkers said that it's very important to start at the bottom with presents and work your way up, she still has the socks I gave her on our first anniversary on the wall over our bed as a reminder...
I'm still trying to teach my boyfriend about good presents and bad presents. Biscuits from the supermarket = bad present. Cheap unbranded laptop battery from China as my only present = bad present (and only lasted 2 months). Anything off my 7-page wishlist = good present. It's literally a list of things I want to receive as presents.
​Can tell you from experience that this is a bad idea.
Had a falling out with some friends. My husband recommended I reach out to an old friend who ghosted me suddenly in a manner that induced some pretty severe abandonment trauma. Went for it anyways because "it's been so long, surely they changed". Am now experiencing the same things as last time.
When you follow bad advice, it can lead to mistakes that you just can’t come back from.​
Buying a house is tricky.
for sale dancing GIF by Lisa VertudachesGiphy"Buy a home now before the prices go up!" -my FIL in 2006.
We bought in 2007 and paid $259,500 for our 1,300 sq ft house (we really couldn't afford it and had an 80/20 so we had 8% interest for one loan and 6% on the other) and in 2008 it was worth $97,000 so refinancing wasn't even an option. We watched all of our neighbors walk away or get foreclosed on but we kept paying our bills and as of this very moment our house is worth $462,000. I'm so happy we stuck it out, we both worked our @sses off and the house will be paid off in 2 years.
It worked out for us, it's a horrible idea. Especially since 1300 sq ft houses are $460+k
My heartbreaks for future generations, I honestly don't know how people are going to afford housing in the future.
It’s there for a reason.
"Never apply for any government assistance."
Cue years of suffering trying to work full-time with a painful disability. Quit a particularly terrible job, and wanted to apply for food aid until I could find another gig; a friend with lots of DHS experience recommended I apply for Social Security "just to get in the system." Turns out my disability was bad enough to get accepted the first time, which I wasn't expecting. Really could've used that support, oh, the 30+ previous years of my life.
Credit is important to have.
I was told to not get a credit card until after college. I was super fortunate to have my college paid for so I had no loans, car paid in cash, no credit card or anything to start building credit. Found myself out in the world at 22 years old with a credit score of 0.
So while a lot of this bad advice came from trusted people, oftentimes they were too misinformed to give that advice in the first place. Don't trust the word of one person--do your research, and make decisions for yourself.
It'll be way better in the long run